Jacksonville Criminal Defense Attorney Blog

Legal analysts for every newspaper, television station and blog have one opinion or another on last week’s announcement that 28-year-old neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman will face a second degree murder charge for shooting unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The decision came from Jacksonville’s own Angela Corey, the state attorney for Clay, Duval and Nassau counties…

A former senior-level Jacksonville Electric Authority engineer pleaded guilty to bribery charges after devising a scheme to sell a contractor construction materials from a city yard for cash. Thomas William Allen was making more than $80,000 a year at JEA before his arrest last fall, according to a report in the Florida Times-Union. Allen went…

Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law is now a national topic in the wake of the attention brought by the February shooting of Trayvon Martin. Other criminal cases involving that Florida affirmative defense, which allows using deadly force instead of forcing a person to retreat, are bubbling to the surface across the state. Jacksonville is…

An elderly, disabled woman who had been inflating her paycheck is confined to her home for two years and must pay back the $161,000 she took from a church she worked for. The missing money was discovered after the Terry Road Baptist Church upgraded its accounting system, according to a report in the Florida Times-Union.…

Less than a week after playing his last basketball game for the University of Florida, former point guard Erving Walker was caught trying to make a fast break from a taco vendor. Walker ran off with the taco without paying for it, and also ran from police before being caught and arrested, according to a…

A Jacksonville computer hacker worked his way into the private e-mails of Hollywood celebrities and sold pictures – including nude photos of actress Scarlett Johannson – to various sites and publications. That drew the attention of the feds, who launched a yearlong operation dubbed “Operation Hackerazzi.” That operation led to Jacksonville’s Christopher Chaney, 35, who…

The mother of Cristian Fernandez pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter in by culpable negligence in Duval County last week in the death of her 2-year-old son and the focus is now on how that will affect the first-degree murder case against Cristian. Cristian, now 13, was 12 when he was the youngest person in Jacksonville…

A St. Augustine city commissioner will not serve any time in the St. Johns County jail, despite his conviction last week on a charge of the misdemeanor of resisting an officer without violence. A jury found Errol Jones guilty after he was arrested and accused of grabbing a police officer’s arm when trying to settle…

Trayvon Martin lived in South Florida. He was shot outside of Orlando. But now Jacksonville is at the heart of the politically explosive case, now that the governor has appointed local Duval County State Attorney Angela Corey to take over the investigation. Martin, 17, was shot and killed by 28-year-old neighborhood watch captain last month.…

A 30-year-old Gainesville man was arrested and charged with manslaughter in a road rage shootout that left one man dead and a toddler unarmed through the gunfire. Brad Andrew Lippincot was also charged with discharging a firearm from a vehicle within 1,000 feet of a person, according to a report in the Florida Times-Union. Lippincot…